Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Herding Cats


CaulynDarr here.  This is my first time posting as a member of the project.  You may have seen me making a general nuisance of myself in the comments these last few weeks.  I'm an Indianapolis local and met Sandwyrm though my various 40K misadventures.  I've also tried my hand at game design a few times.

I'm a analytical person, and Sandwyrm has invited me onto the project to help enforce a little structure on the intuitive types.  The unfortunate reality of the world is that sometimes you need schedules and deadlines to get things done.  I'm here to help with that.

We're going to break the development down into iterations.  The reason for this is that things can get complex when you take too many things into consideration at once.  By reducing the number of concerns you have at one time, you can better focus on the problems at hand.  It also gives you nice small maintainable goals and gets workable versions of the rules out to you guys ASAP.

So here's our tentative schedule.

Draft 1 - Initial cut of the basic rules - Duration 2 weeks(starting today)

  • Movement
  • Terrain
  • Shooting
  • Assault

Draft 1 Testing - Internal testing and review of Draft 1 - Durration 1 week

Draft 2 - Revision and enhancement of Draft 1- Duration 1 week

  • Movement
  • Terrain
  • Shooting
  • Assault
  • Morale

Draft 2 Testing - Internal testing and review of Draft 2 - Durration 1 week

Final Alpha Draft and Basic Units - 2 to 3 units from a selection of armies to facilitate Alpha Testing - Durration 1 week

  • Star Knights
  • Bugs
  • Grun
  • Troopers

Alpha Release! - Hopefully 6 weeks from today!

Alpha Release Testing - Duration 3 weeks

Beta Development - TBD

In order to help meet these goals we need to be disciplined.  Not only on getting the work done, but by not letting the work run away with itself.  We need to make sure that we try not to define rules before we need to. And remember, perfect is the enemy of the good!  Where making a game not landing men on the Moon.  It's better to move into testing with a workable rule and find the edge cases there than to try and figure them out up front.  Theory can only take you so far.  Models on table testing is the best way to evaluate if something works or not.

Lets get to work!  [cracks whip]

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